Howard Jacobson: Clowns aren't funny. They're malicious, vile creatures who deserve everything they get
What you pray for now is that Kaspar will learn from the inside what an unpardonable liberty clowning is
Published: 24 February 2007
Some stories make you believe there's a God. I don't mean inspirational stories. Inspirational stories only make you believe there's a devil. I mean stories so incandescently ludicrous that they couldn't happen if the universe weren't running to a plan. It's last week's clown story I'm referring to. Kaspar the Clown from Leipzig who beat up a little boy for throwing confetti at him and now faces prison.
Leave the boy, the confetti and prison out of it and the story is already funny. A German clown (kaspar is Czech for clown) from Leipzig. Leipzig, the birthplace of that other great comedian, Richard Wagner. Why, particularly, the conjunction of Kaspar, clown and Leipzig promises so much I am not prepared even to try to explain, but think the Monty Python sketch about the Allies dropping fatal jokes on German troops and the Germans hitting back with "Der ver zwei peanuts, valking down der strasse, and von vas ... assaulted peanut. Ho, ho ho!"
Kaspar's real name - because he wasn't christened Clown - is Bernd Kalster. He is 47 years of age. And we all know how being 47 years of age makes you feel. Still doing the same old job, the body failing, marriage maybe on the rocks, audiences dwindling, no one laughing at your jokes. And that's being a novelist, I'm describing. Imagine what it's like being 47 and a clown. In Leipzig!
There he is, anyway, out walking in his too-long yellow jacket, blue pyjama trousers tucked into rainbow-coloured knee-length socks - ho, ho ho! - white gloves, and, of course, a yellow wig and red nose. While advancing in the opposite direction is Amos Lutz, aged 12, fingering his carton of confetti. As for why Amos Lutz is carrying confetti - whether going to a wedding, or just wanting to be ready should a wedding come along - no one has explained. God is my bet. God put the confetti in his pocket.
So now you're Amos Lutz, aged 12, and we all know how being 12 feels. The miracle, given that he's 12, is that Amos Lutz is out at all and not sequestered in the lavatory with whatever passes in Leipzig for erotic literature. The score of Tristan und Isolde, for all I know. But out he is, with confetti in his pocket - perhaps confetti is a euphemism for the shredded evidence of what he's been reading in the lavatory - when he spots Kaspar in his funny clothes.
It's at this point that one's experience of being 12 isn't necessarily of assistance, because when it comes to feelings about clowns not all boys, it would appear, are the same. When I was 12 and saw a clown coming in my direction I ran like the wind. So reluctant was I to meet a clown that my parents talked of sending me to a psychologist. It wasn't normal, my father said, to take against clowns so vehemently.
My own view was that if it wasn't normal in the sense that all boys did it, it was normal in every other way. Clowns were vile, menacing, intrusive, bullying, insensitive, and unfunny. Whoever happened to think otherwise was the one who deserved to be called abnormal, not me.
When I was very small my father took me to the village in which he'd been stationed in the war. One of his friends there was the village idiot, though that is not of course what we would call him today. Seeing how much the village idiot frightened me, my father made me shake his hand. What I feared whenever I saw a clown coming towards me in later years was that my father would make me shake his hand. Since which time I've shaken many things I never thought I'd shake but none of them has been the hand of a clown.
I am not unique in this. Stephen King wrote a novel which imagines clowns as coming long ago from a distant, ill-intentioned planet. I can't remember whether these aliens were born with yellow wigs and red noses or whether they adopted them with malign intent. But the point is that when we see those costumes now and want to run a mile it is atavism at work. We are remembering the ancient terror induced in us by malicious creatures who wore baggy pants. And weren't funny.
In The Confessions of Felix Krull, Thomas Mann speculates similarly about the alienness of clowns, though he doesn't go so far as to suggest they travelled across space to get here. "Are these ageless, half-grown sons of absurdity ... human at all? I honour them and defend them against ordinary bad taste when I say no, they are not, they are exceptions, side-splitting monsters of preposterousness, glittering, world-renouncing monks of unreason, cavorting hybrids, part human and part insane art."
Whether that means little Thomas Mann aged 12 and strolling past the circus in Lübeck would have been delighted or frightened to see Kaspar coming towards him I can't say. Frightened is my guess. All novelists are frightened of clowns whatever they write about them in their novels. Clowns are the violation we become novelists to avenge.
Which doesn't augur well, should he be harbouring literary ambitions, for young Amos Lutz. He, it would seem, is nothing daunted by Kaspar the clown. Knowing what clowns do, having seen them countless times spraying circus audiences with water, little Amos greets as he would be greeted and - in a spirit of the most innocent and high-spirited clown-to-clown brotherliness - lets fly with his confetti.
What you pray for now if you loathe clowns as much as I do is that Bernd Kalster will learn from the inside what an unpardonable liberty clowning is. Discover he cannot take what he dishes out. Learn he is no better at getting a joke than he is at making one. And so give the lie once and for all to the pretence that clowns are lovable.
In the event, Kaspar goes one better. In the language of Leipzig, he überschnapps. Not only does he throw Amos to the ground, he punches him, kicks him, and otherwise does what many of us wished we'd done to every clown that dared come near us years ago. What seemed to disturb Amos most, apart from Kaspar not finding his confetti funny, was the way he "growled at me behind his smile". Which we hope will teach him never to trust the smile of a man who's paid to smile again.
The last word goes to Amos's father. "The clown's a psycho," he says.
So tell us something we didn't already know, Mr Lutz.
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